On-going
series: Crisis in the Caucasus - 2008
The Russian / Georgian Conflict and Its Impact on AzerbaijanWindow on Eurasia: Original
Blog Article

Eagles Mere, PA, September 30
- Moscow has never investigated a single terrorist incident "to
the end," according to a leading Russian legal specialist,
and its failure to do so not only has opened the way for more
terrorist actions but raised questions in the minds of many about
the complicity of Russian officials in particular cases.

Mikhail Trepashkin, who coordinates
legal aid for the All-Russian public organization The Commission
for the Struggle with Corruption, argues that this involves not
only major terrorist acts like those at Buinaksk, Moscow and
Volgodonsk which claimed hundreds of lives but many smaller ones
as well. http://newsland.ru/News/Detail/id/301290/cat/42/

In some cases, the powers that
be have arrested the executors of these crimes but not the organizers.
And the former, having been incarcerated, which is where Trepashkin
has worked with them, "complain that they were deceived
[by the latter] and promised short sentences in exchange for
confessions but, in fact, were given longer ones."

But the problem is larger
than these individual human tragedies, he says. It touches on
the entire society because "the special services apply the
paragraph of secrecy to conceal their own violations of the law"
and thus the relatives of the victims are not able to find out
who was responsible for their deaths.

And that, in turn, leads
both the authorities and the terrorists to believe that they
can get away with more such crimes and the Russian people to
distrust the one and fear the other in ways that a more open
and complete approach to the investigation of such incidents
would preclude, Trepashkin says.

When Putin declared that "it
is possible to kill [Chechens] even in the toilet," the
Moscow lawyer says, he was in effect giving permission to the
authorities to murder large numbers of people "without trial
or investigation" and, thereby, allowing those responsible
to evade responsibility.

"If we had known the
origin of [such terrorist acts]," Trepashkin continues,
we would have understood how to struggle against it." And
Russians would have gained even more, he insists, because they
would have been able to avoid the situation that now infects
much of Russian life.

Such actions by the authorities
both in 1999 and more recently in cases like the Yamadayev killing
mean that "any person who is thinking logically begins to
conclude that those who ordered the killing of those who carried
out the crime do not want them to tell who ordered them to commit
it."

That is all the more so, Trepashkin
continues, because those who have tried to investigate these
crimes on their own, as he did, face threats and even fabricated
criminal charges that he planned to assassinate Putin. In 2002,
he says, he was told to stop investigating the apartment bombings,
and when he refused, he was charged and brought before a closed
military court.

"The prosecutor at that
time directly told" him, the lawyer says, that "yes,
he had been arrested illegally, that there was no evidence of
a crime, but that all the same the chief military prosecutor
had agreed with the judges of the military collegiums of the
Supreme Court of the Russian Federation to convict him."

Moreover, the prosecutor added,
Trepashkin would "not be able to appeal his sentence in
Russia because the military collegium would not allow him to
do so." That order, Trepashkin was told, came from "the
highest" ­ a euphemism not for the director of the FSB
but for his boss, then-President Vladimir Putin.

Trepashkin is not the only Russian
commentator writing about this problem. In an article posted
online this week, Yuri Girenko argues that Russia's basic problem
in this regard is that it has sometimes sought law and sometimes
order but it has not sought order in law because that takes time
to develop. http://newsland.ru/News/Detail/id/300837/cat/42/

"The brutal murder of [Yamadayev]
in the center of Moscow made it clear that in Russia there is
no more important task than to guarantee law and order."
But it is "especially difficult to do this," the Moscow
writer continues, in a way that "law and order" do
not become mutually exclusive categories.

At various points in its history,
Russia has had order "based not on law but on force."
And at other times, the country has witnessed "attempts
to make Law the foundation of statehood." But those efforts
have ended every time either with a new tyranny or anarchy"
largely because their authors have moved too quickly to be able
to ensure order.

And then, as events like the
murder of Yamadayev happen, order is once again valued "higher
than law" because "the weakness of the Law undermines
Order," a vicious circle that Girenko argues cannot be cut
by decree but rather by slow, slogging work, something neither
Russian rulers nor many ordinary Russians yet seem to want to
do.